Ticketed bags are conveyed from a check-in area, to the departure area of an airport on conveyors. These conveyors typically dump onto a closed loop, discharge conveyor. Baggage handlers must then individually carry and lift each bag from the discharge conveyor onto a baggage cart. The handlers must carry and hand lift the bags to the baggage cart, and reach across a few feet to fill a lower row on a far side of the cart before lifting bags onto the lower row on the near side of the cart. Then they must similarly lift bags to an upper row and across the cart before then lifting bags to the upper row near side of the baggage cart. After the baggage cart has been loaded the baggage handlers most frequently must push the loaded cart out of the way and position an empty waiting cart before they can finish unloading the discharge conveyor. Empty carts may weigh 1800 pounds and loaded carts may weigh more than 5000 pounds. Loading, shuffling unloaded and loaded carts, co-ordinating transport, and subsequently unloading the baggage cart is a time consuming, labor intensive, injury prone process. The bags are both bulky and heavy. Loaders frequently suffer injuries and are off work due to these injuries.
Airports are very limited by space as to the number of baggage carts that can circulate, and be staged empty around the discharge conveyors. Baggage carts are typically 5 feet wide by 10 feet long. If there was sufficient room loaders and drivers would prefer to stage an adequate number of empty baggage carts parallel to the discharge conveyors to completely load all baggage onto for a given flight. Space limitations in the number of baggage carts that can be staged is presently a bottleneck for the airline industry which limits the throughput of baggage, and the throughput of planes.
Transporting, individually lifting and loading the bags onto the baggage cart, co-ordinating towing the baggage cart to the awaiting aircraft, then rehandling the bags to load onto the aircraft is a considerably more time consuming step, than having the passengers walk onto the aircraft. It is not unusual for the loaders to be held up while they wait for a driver, who tows the loaded carts to an awaiting aircraft, or to remove and replace the loaded cart with an empty cart. Passengers often wait for completion of baggage loading prior to departure. If a more efficient apparatus or method of moving the bags from the discharge conveyor to the aircraft could be devised, then the same passenger gates, at any given airport could turn around substantially more flights. What is needed is a baggage rack which eliminates the need for loaders to substantially lift the bags, and which can accommodate more bags. What is also needed is a baggage rack which eliminates the need to stage carts at the discharge conveyor, and thereby eliminates the need to shuffle empty and full carts to and from the discharge conveyor. Additionally if the loaded rack could be configured to automatically discharge accumulated bags, substantial additional labor and time could be saved.